Frank commentary from an unretired call girl

FarmVille

Physically there is nothing to distinguish human society from the farm-yard except that children are more troublesome and costly than chickens and calves and that men and women are not so completely enslaved as farm stock. – George Bernard Shaw

Most of my readers are probably familiar with FarmVille, a computer game available through Facebook in which one creates and tends a virtual farm. He raises virtual crops, which can be harvested for virtual money which is then used to buy more land, seed, tools, animals, etc. The farm is completely dependent on its owner; if crops are not harvested when ripe they wither and if animals are not fed they fail to grow. I say “animals” because they are shaped like animals, but of course they aren’t animals even in a virtual sense because they don’t do anything which characterizes animals. They don’t have individual differences, move on their own, escape from pens, get sick, fight with one another or anything else. In other words, they’re really just another type of virtual plant, passively remaining exactly where they’re placed by the game player, and they don’t need space or a particular type of habitat or even shelter from the elements because there aren’t any.

Of course, this doesn’t really matter because they’re just collections of data, electronic patterns which form the “pieces” of an electronic game, and can therefore be manipulated without moral consequences. And since it’s unlikely that many FarmVille players will ever own farms of their own, there’s very little chance of the sort of disappointment a naïve teenage mother may experience when it sinks in that her baby is not a doll and cannot simply be laid aside when she doesn’t feel like playing house any more. Real babies and real animals are often unpredictable, and unlike the cute little cartoon critters of FarmVille cannot merely be stacked up in neat little rows without any concern for what they might want…not without consequences, anyway.

Apparently, Nicholas Kristof doesn’t understand this; he imagines women and girls as passive, vegetable entities to be locked into compounds and “protected” like the electronic “animals” in FarmVille. Think I’m exaggerating? Here it is, straight from the horse’s mouth; the following is from an interview with Kristof published on January 10th in Fast Company and called to my attention two weeks later by a “tweet” from Melissa Gira Grant:

I think gaming might be the next big platform for news organizations and causes…there are a lot of people who spend a lot of time playing games online, so we in the news business would do well to think about how we can use games to attract eyeballs. My wife and I are…creating a Facebook game…It will be vaguely analogous to FarmVille. You’ll have a village, and in order to nurture this village, you’ll have to look after the women and girls in the village. Actions in the game will also have real-world effects. In other words, there will be schools and refugee camps that will benefit if you do well in the game…

What fun! No doubt you’ll be able to arrange your little brown women and girls any way you like, and they’ll obediently and passively stay put until the bad old “traffickers” come to take them away. Then you can “rescue” them from little cartoon brothels, and put them right back in their little village where they belong. And your actions in the game will have real-world effects, because as godlike Western white people you should have the power of life and death over doll-like women and girls in third-world villages who will perish without your deific benevolence.

If Kristof had ever demonstrated some actual regard for the complex and often contradictory desires, needs and behaviors of real women I might not read this subtext into his silly game, but he hasn’t; females of every age are simply props to him, little game-pieces whose function is the aggrandizement of Nicholas Kristof. He treats the real lives of sex workers as FarmVille players treat the existence of their virtual creatures: as things to be manipulated for profit and “points”. He uses the stories of girls to build up his own reputation, exaggerating their lurid details and reworking them into enslavement porn from which he reaps the profit while condemning others as “pimps” (talk about pot calling kettle black…) He participates in Hollywood cowboy “brothel raids”, then never stops to wonder what happened to the women he “rescued” afterward. And he no more bothers to consider what the girls he “rescues” and writes about might want than a FarmVille player considers the desires of his digital farm animals. To Kristof, individual women are as interchangeable and passive as endlessly-duplicated digital beasts, and our function is to stay wherever he puts us and earn him money and status.

Fortunately, I’m not the only one who recognizes Kristof for what he is; there are actually quite a few (including some at his own paper), but most don’t dare to speak out because it isn’t politically correct to blaspheme Saint Nicholas right now. One who both sees and dares is Laura Agustín, who has written a number of columns against him; the most recent (and one of her best yet) appeared on January 25th in Counterpunch. It’s called “The Soft Side of Imperialism”, and I urge you to read it in its entirety; she, too, was struck by the paternalistic attitude inherent in “KristofVille”, but places it and its creator in a much larger (and even more disturbing) perspective.

23 Responses

Kristof is jumping the shark – and this kind of thing will be his downfall in the end. See, that is the thing … when you’re a circus act like Kristof is, you have to continuously escalate the difficulty and come up with ever-more interesting tricks. If you fail to do that – people get bored and walk out of the big top.

Since Kristof is working simply with smoke and mirrors – he has no real “trick” … and he has no place to go with it.

My prediction is that this game will be a spectacular failure on Facebook, if it ever comes to pass, and one that will leave a lot of egg on Nick’s face. 😀

Seriously, I’ve been playing an online game named AstroEmpires for about four years now … it’s not an intense game and requires only a marginal amount of my time. However, I have come into contact with a lot of gamers from all over the world (that’s probably the biggest attraction for me – since I travel a lot and I’ve actually met a lot of the people I play online with … it’s freaky – I have friends in Bucharest, Romania! LOL. We talk all the time online via Microsoft MSN, or skype, or some other medium and it’s great for getting to understand political views and opinions of people around the world toward Americans).

One thing I’ve learned about gamers though – is they don’t apply political correctness to the gaming experience. Almost universally, this is the place to unleash their “evil” side and they are looking for interesting games. They’re not looking for games that were designed as “propaganda” to “re-educate” them. They spot these games really fast and vote with their online feet by staying away from them.

Now, if I were to design a game for Nick – it would be based on hardcore human trafficking. The kind where you lasso a bunch of Moldavan lasses and then smuggle them in to various places for sex work! THAT kind of game might have a chance – in much the same way that “Grand Theft Auto” became popular.

It seems as though in KristofVille, men are totally safe from being trafficked or coerced into situations they wouldn’t have chosen on their own. I mean, what about protecting boy children from becoming child soldiers after the raiding militia has threatened/killed their parents in order to take those children for their own purposes? Or maybe warfare is okay with him…

I’ve got Facebook, because my family seems to have forgotten how to send e-mail to ME once THEY got Facebook. If I didn’t have Facebook, I’d never know what was going on.

I’ve got an idea for a better, more realistic game. It would be called Pimpin’ (Kristof will like that part) and in it you run a brothel. You can work with willing, adult prostitutes, but you can also work with trafficked minors. This latter lets you charge a higher price, but is very risky because if even one of the little brats escapes, or if even one of your customers has both a conscience and a lawyer who can get him immunity, your whole empire comes crashing down. Meanwhile, working with willing adults generates a steady source of income.

You can get away with the trafficked minors thing a little longer if you choose the “PROSTITUTION IS ILLEGAL” option.

Hey, Maggie, here’s an idea for a game: call it WhoreWorld. You’re a prostitute who gets to choose which country or province or state which to work in, and the laws that apply to that area. Players will get the real thing. Arrests, sex-coercion by cops, the whole nine yards. Of course, they can choose New Zealand to avoid all that.

On that subject, Sullivan’s blog had a lengthy post (http://tinyurl.com/86xbj97) by someone claiming that the depiction of European whoredom is wildly inaccurate. This sounds like a biased sample — if they’re medical workers, they’re seeing the worst cases. Then again, when someone says “In countries with both legalized and illegal prostitution, even in Europe, most of the women/girls are trafficked to begin with. Period. “, I question their objectivity since Germany’s own investigations have not shown this.

Most prostitutes are certainly *not* trafficked in Europe, as even some trafficking propagandists admit.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) created the figure of 140,000 trafficked persons in Europe, which is approximately 14% of prostitutes. But their own number of detected victims was slightly more than 7,000 (less than 1% of prostitutes in Europe), which was then multiplied by a factor of twenty to get the 140,000 figure.

So, they add in a random multiplier to generate a much higher number, and additionally they define trafficking so widely that they include normal migration:

Trafficking originating from the Balkans, the former Soviet Union and Central Europe is characterized by recruitment conducted by victims’ acquaintances. According to studies conducted in the Czech Republic, Poland and Romania, the majority of victims are recruited through acquaintances, friends or relatives. Similar patterns have been reported in the South Caucasus. Studies from Ukraine indicate that 11% of victims were trafficked with the active cooperation of their husbands.

A similar trend is seen among Nigerians…

Studies of Nigerian victims report that acquaintances, close friends or family members play a major role in the recruitment of victims. Recruitment frequently occurs in the victim’s own home.

The UNODC conflate a woman being driven to an airport by a friend or relative with trafficking them into prostitution at gunpoint.

Later, they make the claim that Chinese trafficking occurs “in the context of assisted irregular migration”. So even paying someone else to transport you to where you want to go is also trafficking, in the eyes of the opposition.

George Orwell understood the power of language. As soon as a dysphemism is attached to something (“recruited”, “exposure”, “victim”, “trafficked”, “ring”, “perpetrated”, “abetted”) it immediately becomes sinister in the minds of those too gullible to understand how they’re being manipulated, and the quest for a better life is transformed into crime and degradation…though in real life, it’s still exactly what it was before.

I’ve been reading and watching videos about basic income (social dividend, basic income guarantee, etc.). The basic idea is that everybody, from Bill Gates to the guy living under a bridge, would get a basic income which would be enough to get by. It would not be means tested and would have no work requirement. You get whether you are rich or poor, a workaholic or a lazy bum, and of course anything in between. It’s an interesting idea that I’m still wrapping my head around.

I got to a video called “Pros and Cons” and one of the suggested benefits of guaranteeing each person a basic income was that women would no longer “sell themselves as prostitutes.” Thanks to this blog, I felt I could say something about that.

“First off, there will still be prostitutes. A high-class prostitute can make six figures a year, so unless the BI is 75 to 100 thousand euro, prostitution will still exist (and more men will be able to afford an occasional dalliance with one).”

You know, Maggie, when I’m not blogging about disreputable libertarian issues, I actually make a living as a software developer. So if you ever want to fight back and launch WhoreVille, I think we could do business. I’m just sayin’…

[…] FarmVille (Maggie McNeill) If Kristof had ever demonstrated some actual regard for the complex and often contradictory desires, needs and behaviors of real women I might not read this subtext into his silly game, but he hasn’t; females of every age are simply props to him, little game-pieces whose function is the aggrandizement of Nicholas Kristof. He treats the real lives of sex workers as FarmVille players treat the existence of their virtual creatures: as things to be manipulated for profit and “points”. He uses the stories of girls to build up his own reputation, exaggerating their lurid details and reworking them into enslavement porn from which he reaps the profit while condemning others as “pimps” (talk about pot calling kettle black…) He participates in Hollywood cowboy “brothel raids”, then never stops to wonder what happened to the women he “rescued” afterward. And he no more bothers to consider what the girls he “rescues” and writes about might want than a FarmVille player considers the desires of his digital farm animals. To Kristof, individual women are as interchangeable and passive as endlessly-duplicated digital beasts, and our function is to stay wherever he puts us and earn him money and status. […]

[…] FarmVille (Maggie McNeill) If Kristof had ever demonstrated some actual regard for the complex and often contradictory desires, needs and behaviors of real women I might not read this subtext into his silly game, but he hasn’t; females of every age are simply props to him, little game-pieces whose function is the aggrandizement of Nicholas Kristof. He treats the real lives of sex workers as FarmVille players treat the existence of their virtual creatures: as things to be manipulated for profit and “points”. He uses the stories of girls to build up his own reputation, exaggerating their lurid details and reworking them into enslavement porn from which he reaps the profit while condemning others as “pimps” (talk about pot calling kettle black…) He participates in Hollywood cowboy “brothel raids”, then never stops to wonder what happened to the women he “rescued” afterward. And he no more bothers to consider what the girls he “rescues” and writes about might want than a FarmVille player considers the desires of his digital farm animals. To Kristof, individual women are as interchangeable and passive as endlessly-duplicated digital beasts, and our function is to stay wherever he puts us and earn him money and status. […]

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